> Extreme example (IANAL): a person who uses Facebook heavily and is part of the "more negative stories" group commits suicide. Is Facebook exposed to any legal

> Extreme example (IANAL): a person who uses Facebook heavily and is part of the "more negative stories" group commits suicide. Is Facebook exposed to any legal risk because of this? IANAL either, but a) I'm guessing not, but b) not really the ethical question here either way (e.g. it might be legal but unethical or vice versa, or both, or neither). So I'll focus instead on the ethical question raised by the suicide: I guess I don't see how this is any different from some editor in a newsroom saying, "let's publish more gory crime stories and see what happens". Someone reads a bunch of it and commits suicide. Tragic, obviously, but not really the victim of an unethical experiment. Worse, the paper doesn't even know, since it can't monitor the response. Or: let's say FB never runs this experiment and they never find out that their current algorithm is especially depressing and all sorts of people kill themselves. What are the ethics of that?